To my reckoning, the series of articles the L.A. Times has done on the Los Angeles Unified School District’s inability and/or refusal to fire bad teachers is the greatest thing that newspaper has ever done. The Times’ reportage on this subject has answered questions and concerns I’ve had my whole life. I’ve been blind, but now — thanks to The Times — I see.

I am a product of the LAUSD, from kindergarten throughout high school, and I have had some real dogs for teachers. Don’t get me wrong, the overwhelming majority of them were good teachers; many of them were actually great teachers, but there was the occasional dog assigned to teach me who, despite his or her obvious failings, remained in the classroom year after year despite repeated complaints. I remember them very well.

In junior high school (that’s what grades seven, eight and nine were called in my day), I had a teacher who was paid to teach me drunk. This man often came to class reeking of alcohol in the middle of the day. I had an alcoholic uncle so even at age 13, I knew what drunk looked like, what drunk smelled like, what drunk sounded like and what drunk acted like. And this teacher was drunk most of the time and everybody knew it, yet he was allowed to teach me.

One day, Mr. — and I got into a disagreement about the subject matter. I was right and he was drunk and I told him so and he got into my face and called me foul names, all the while spewing alcohol-laced spit in my face. I got up from my desk, went to the principal’s office and told the principal that Mr. — was drunk again, had cussed me out and spit in my face and I was not going to take it and that I was going home right now and I was going to tell my dad and he’s going to come here and beat him up. The principal told me I could not leave the school, but, of course, I left. That evening, I told my dad what happened and said I didn’t want to go to school that anymore because the teacher is drunk and nasty, like Uncle John.

The next day, my dad accompanied me to school and we went to see the principal about Mr. —. The principal told us everything will be all right now because Mr. — is no longer at the school and someone else is taking over his classes. My dad said: “Oh, he’s been fired, then?” The principal replied: “He’s just not here and Betty doesn’t have to worry about him anymore.”

Now I know that, according to The Times articles, Mr. — was probably not fired but was simply sent to another school or sent home with pay!

Also in junior high school, I had a teacher who barely said a word in class. She would assign us various chapters to read in our textbooks and then she would spend the rest of the period sitting at her desk knitting argyle socks!

This teacher was an older lady and we all assumed that she could get away with her non-teaching behavior because she was the principal’s mother. She wasn’t, of course, but we kids had to affix a cause or reason for everything that was odd and beyond the pale. Being bored, I would often leave that class and if caught by an adult and questioned as to why I wasn’t in class, I’d say: “I have Mrs. so-and-so” and was then told to go to the vice principal’s office and write something, which is what I usually did, since I had a job writing school news for the neighborhood newspaper for $5 a week. All the grown-ups in the school knew that old lady was knitting socks and dissipating my educational opportunities but they did nothing about it. I had to take matters into my own hands and grab the reins of my destiny!

I guess junior high school is the dumping ground for bad teachers, because I had another one. Check this out: When the new school year started, I and another girl found ourselves in a class with an unfamiliar teacher and a bunch of kids I didn’t know. The class was a jungle. It was chaotic and in complete disarray, and the kids were doing anything and everything they wanted. I’d never seen anything like it and didn’t know what to make of it. The teacher did nothing. Not only did she fail to teach, she failed to maintain order in the classroom. Her behavior was what I’d describe today as catatonic. She wasn’t even a decent babysitter, let alone a teacher!

After we’d spent two or three days in that class, a counselor came into the room and removed me and that other girl, took us to the office and said: “Why didn’t you tell us you were in the wrong class?” I replied: “I went to the class on the schedule that you gave me, so how was it wrong?” She said I (and the other girl) “did not belong” in that class and that we had been assigned to it by mistake. We were immediately escorted to our proper class and I breathed a sigh of relief. But that experience has always bothered me. Even in my present old age, I wonder why it was all right for the school to assign some kids to a class taught by a whacked-out ditz like that, and purposely steer other kids away from her. What were the criteria? If she wasn’t good enough to teach me, why was she teaching anybody?

Now I know: According to The Times’ articles, she was probably “teaching” because the teachers union wouldn’t have it any other way.
Which is obviously the case of Amy Cotton, the special ed teacher at the Wilshire area school I wrote about last year. Cotton had a well-known habit of “losing” her students, as she was so inattentive and spaced-out that her students would leave her classroom, leave the campus and wander the neighborhood unbeknownst to her. Parents, teacher’s aides and other school personnel complained, reported and protested like crazy about her and the principal, district administrators and even Board Member Marguerite LaMotte did nothing about her — wouldn’t even talk about her — until after I wrote about the situation. And what did they do? They transferred Cotton to another school in the same neighborhood, making it necessary for the parents from the first school to warn the parents at the new school about the danger Cotton posed to their children. Thanks to The Times, I see now that the district couldn’t deal with Cotton in an appropriate manner because the teachers union had firmly planted long-standing obstacles in its way.

I didn’t have any bad teachers when I was in elementary school. To my recollection, they were all great. For the most part, so were my high school teachers. Except in high school I had one teacher who was an evangelical Christian who kept exhorting me to be “Christian-like” in the manner in which I produced the school newspaper, as he said I tended to attack and belittle people in my column. I had to keep reminding him that this was a secular school and he needs to stop talking to me about his religion. Nevertheless, he was a good teacher — when he wasn’t preaching.

Also in high school I had a teacher who was a bit of a racist, but she, too, was good, except when she made repeated references to her Redondo Beach home and her “lily-white hands.” Both these teachers remained at their posts for many years and that’s okay, because they did their jobs, but I still think they should have been reprimanded by somebody other than me, which I was forced to do in my column a couple of times.
It all makes sense to me now: I had to deal with these bad teachers because the Los Angeles Unified School District couldn’t deal with the teachers union. Damn.